The juxtaposition of serious and absurd reveals makes it difficult for the audience to tell which type each individual detail is going to be, leading to an overall more surprising story. He tried. America, he thought, has gone. He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. The dollar, he thought, had sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonalds, he thought. He passed out. When he came round a second later he found he was sobbing for his mother.
This added flexibility as opposed to serious science fiction stories makes for a more dynamic experience. John Scalzi, himself a very good sci-fi-comedy writer, makes a point about how difficult traditional British farce humor is in his writing about Adams. Any sort of comedy or humor is difficult to write, mind you; it just looks easy or at the very least is supposed to look easy.
But to do a very specific type of humor — in this case British farce — is even harder to do, especially if one is not already a practitioner of the form. Douglas Adams was. Scalzi paints Adams as a practitioner of a comedic style that few others can imitate, and his readers are inclined to agree. This explains both how he was able to combine science fiction and comedy, and why he wanted to.
Adams was altogether a skilled writer who contributed to popular culture in the contexts of science fiction and comedy. Comedies traditionally end with some happy event that makes everyone feel better—like a marriage. If you consider that something that will make you feel better, that is.
Hitchhiker's comedy, though, is kind of dark: Earth is destroyed and never fixed, and not only does Arthur not find much enlightenment or happiness, he also has to face the idea that his life has been a total lie he's not a human being—he's just part of a computer that a pair of mice bought. And at the end of the book, it's not like our heroes are not going on some great quest to fix the galaxy.
They're just going off to get a bite to eat. This is comedy, but it's dark. Now, you might find people on the interwebs describing Hitchhiker's Guide as a parody , as if it's funny because it's making fun of other science fiction works. We disagree. Sure, it makes a few jokes about Star Trek and Doctor Who , but most of the humor comes from the absurd situations that the characters find themselves in. In a parody, you have to know something about the original to get the joke.
In Hitchhiker's Guide , most of the jokes only rely on an ability to notice that things don't fit together: brainiac mice, depressed robots, a fjord-maker, and so on. Help empower the next generation to raise their voices and move forward in a spirit of openness and inclusion - make a tax-deductible contribution to KidSpirit today.
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